King’s support for terrorism
doesn’t stop there, however: he is also a fervent booster of the “Real
IRA,” an Irish Republican terrorist organization that plants bombs and assassinates its enemies. As a supporter of Irish Northern Aid,
King lent his name and prestige to a group that was buying weapons
for the “Real” IRA, which were used to murder civilians as well
as British government officials and police.

If anyone should be accused
of support for terrorism – material support – it’s King, and the
only reason he’s not been charged is because there are two sets of
laws in this country, one for us lowly plebs, who might travel to, say,
Colombia, or Palestine, and meet with someone our government doesn’t
approve of, and another set of laws for the political class, the members
of which can do anything [.pdf] they damn well please as long as they don’t
inconvenience higher-ups in the DC food chain.

Speaking of the political class, listen to William Kristol, the little Lenin of the neocons, as he dispenses advice to the Obama-ites on how to deal
with WikiLeaks:

“From now on, a policy
of no comment about anything in any of these documents should be the
absolute rule. No apologies, no complaints, no explanations, no excuses.
No present or former government official should deign to discuss anything
in these documents. No one in the executive branch should confirm or
deny the accuracy of any document. No one should hasten to reassure
any foreign leader of anything, or seek to put any cable in context.
No one in Congress should cite anything in these documents to make a
point about any issue. The entire American government and political
class should simply go about its important foreign policy business,
and treat these leaks as beneath contempt, and beneath comment.”

Kristol and his ilk don’t
believe they’re answerable to anyone but other members of the “political
class” – because, don’t you know, they’re above reproach, or
criticism of any kind. Sniffy disdain is the only possible response
to any attempt to question their royal prerogatives. These Bourbons have learned nothing in the past decade,
during which their failed policies have visited disaster on American
foreign policy and the peoples of the Middle East – and, what’s
more, they don’t care to learn anything. They would rather close their
eyes and ears, and just “go about their important foreign policy business,”
wreaking murder and mayhem in their wake, while the rest of the world
marvels at the enormity of their crimes, and the small-mindedness
of the chief criminals.

Kristol’s prescription perfectly
expresses the neoconservative view of power and its proper exercise:
the common people who pay for our overseas empire have no right to know
about, let alone criticize, our overseas shenanigans. Their role is
simply to subsidize the whole mess, and let their betters (i.e. Kristol,
various Kaganfamilymembers, and the laptop bombardiers at AEI and
Heritage) determine policy. How dare the hoi polloi interfere!

This is a perfectly natural impulse
on the part of the political class, of which Kristol is an exemplar:
secrecy is essential to the success of their most important
scams operations, and always has been. That’s where the
tremendous resistance on the part of the Establishment to Ron Paul’s
campaign to audit the Federal Reserve is coming from. If the American
people knew, in detail, what scams were robbing them blind, and what
murderous plots were being carried out in their name, they’d rebel
– and we can’t have that!

Which brings to mind a particular
item from the WikiLeaks document release,a cable from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a small
Central Asian nation where the US had to make a major effort to keep
Manas air force base from being dismantled by the local authorities,
who were demanding more “foreign aid” as the price to keep it open.
Meeting with the Chinese ambassador, our own envoy “mentioned that
Kyrgyz officials had told her that China had offered a $3 billion financial
package to close Manas Air Base and asked for the Ambassador’s reaction
to such an allegation.”

According to this self-serving
and prolix missive, Ambassador Zhang was “visibly flustered,”
and even “temporarily lost the ability to speak Russian and began
spluttering in Chinese to the silent aide diligently taking notes right
behind him.” Our ambassador continues:

“Composing himself, Zhang
inquired if maybe the Kyrgyz had meant the trade turnover between the
two countries, which he claimed was about $3 billion a year. When
disabused of that notion, Zhang went on at length to explain that China
could not afford a $3 billion loan and aid package. ‘It would take $3 from every Chinese person” to pay for it. If our people found out, there’d be a revolution,’
he said. ‘We have 200 million people unemployed” because
of the downturn in exports, he said, and millions of disabled and others
who need help from the government.’”

“If our people found out,
there’d be a revolution” – and that is precisely the point. That’s
why Kristol and the war-bots are frothing at the mouth over WikiLeaks’
latest coup. Because if the American people really understood what was
being donein their name, and at their expense, they’d rise up as
one and deliver one thumping kick in the ass to the entire political
class. There would indeed be a revolution – which is why WikiLeaks
is being excoriated by both the right and and the left, by Clare McCaskill
(on CNN the other day) as well the Fox News types.

Curiously, it looks like the
Chinese political class is much more sensitive to popular sentiment
than our own mandarins, at least when it comes to foreign adventurism
and extravagant spending abroad. As the dialogue between the two ambassadors
continues, the essential cluelessness of the American envoy – one
Tatiana Gfoeller, career diplomat and former Consul General of the US
embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – comes through as she continues to
press Ambassador Zhang:

“The Ambassador then asked
what Zhang thought about the $2 billion plus Russian deal with Kyrgyzstan.
After some hemming and hawing, Zhang said it was ‘probably true’ that the Russian assistance was tied to closing
Manas. Asked if he had any concerns about the Kyrgyz Republic
falling ever deeper into the Russian sphere of influence and whether
China had any interest in countering this, he answered that Kyrgyzstan
was already in that sphere, and China had no interest in balancing that
influence. ‘Kyrgyzstan is Russia’s neighbor,’ he intoned
… ‘And when the Kyrgyz ask me about this, I always tell them that
a neighbor is a gift from God.’ As for China’s interests in
the Kyrgyz Republic, he stated flatly: ‘We have only commercial interests here. We want to
increase investment and trade. We have no interest in politics.’
He claimed that some Kyrgyz had argued for China to open a base in Kyrgyzstan
to counterbalance Russian and American influence in the country, but
China has no interest in a base. ‘We want no military or political advantage. Therefore, we wouldn’t
pay $3 billion for Manas,’ he argued.”

It never occurs to Ambassador
Gfoeller that maybe, just maybe, the Kyrgyz came up with that story
about an alleged Chinese offer of $3 billion because they want to create
the illusion of a three-way bidding war – and wring more money out
of the extravagant Americans. Zhang, the Communist, is more cost-conscious
than Gfoeller, supposedly the representative of a capitalist country,
and, what’s more, he is full of good advice about how to get the best
price:

“Zhang asked the Ambassador whether the U.S. would negotiate to
keep the Base open. The Ambassador answered that the U.S. side
was evaluating its options. Zhang then offered his ‘personal advice.’
‘This is all about money,’ he said. He understood from the Kyrgyz
that they needed $150 million. [Gfoeller] explained that the U.S.
does provide $150 million in assistance to Kyrgyzstan each year,
including numerous assistance programs. Zhang suggested that the
U.S. should scrap its assistance programs. ‘Just give them $150
million in cash’ per year, and ‘you will have the Base forever.’
Very uncharacteristically, the silent young aide then jumped in: ‘Or
maybe you should give them $5 billion and buy both us and the Russians
out.’ The aide then withered under the Ambassador’s horrified
stare.”

That young aide just couldn’t
help himself. The Americans – bankrupts going around the world throwing
money out of airplanes – just beg to be mocked. Ambassador Gfoeller, fortunately
for her self-esteem, didn’t seem to get it. In any case, as it turned
out, we wound up having the yearly rent on the Manas base tripled, to
$60 million, in addition to paying $150 million in “assistance”
programs.

Our policy of global interventionism
doesn’t come cheap: if you add the military budget to a great deal
of the operational costs of the US government, what you end up with
is the total cost of our overseas Empire – an enterprise that is enormously
lucrative for a very small minority of Americans, and hideously burdensome
for the rest of us. And then there are the moral costs of supporting
dictators, sucking up to numerous sleazeballs, and generally treating
the peoples of the world like pawns in a game.

“We have only commercial
interests here. We want to increase investment and trade.
We have no interest in politics” – this is a foreign policy
that makes sense for a republic of traders and entrepreneurs. Why is
it that it has to be enunciated by a representative of a Communist state?

The way Julian Assange is releasing these cables is a stroke of
genius, because the cumulative effect paints a devastating portrait of
a policy wielded by spendthrift know-it-alls, one designed to do
nothing but enrich the undeserving and empower the worst. As the
foibles of our preening viceroys are publicized, and the enormous scale
of the waste and fraud comes to the attention of the American people, a
revolution is indeed possible. That’s why the Establishment of both
parties, and pundits on the neocon right and the Obama-ite left, are
out to knife Assange and bring down WikiLeaks. They may fight about how
much to raise the retirement age, and how to divide the tax
loot, but when it comes to defending the Empire – and the cult of
secrecy that sustains it in a “democratic” Imperium such as ours – they
stand united, both red and blue. That’s why Chris Matthews can smear
Assange as a “rapist,” even though he knows it’s a trumped-up charge,
and neoconnish “libertarian” Michael Moynihan – who believes the very
idea of any US government pressure on the Swedish government to harass
Assange is only credible to “wild-eyed, spittle-flecked
conspiracists [sic] bloggers”
– can get in on the act, too.

Oh, but of course the US government
– our government – would never
do anything so rude, so crass, so un-libertarian as to try to
discredit a prominent critic through sexual innuendo or other dirty tricks. Now would it?

The smear campaign against
Assange is a disgrace, and good for him for walking out of an interview when his interlocutor insisted on pursuing the “rape” angle. And
bravo for making the New York Times go to the Guardian
for the cables: that Times “profile” of Assange was another
in a long series of smear pieces that have appeared in our court press
with suspicious regularity. This is the price some “journalists”
pay for access to the corridors of power, and they’re not only willing
but downright eager to pay it. Jobs in journalism are hard to come by
these days.

One thing I personally appreciate
about the WikiLeaks mega-dump is that it provides me with plenty to
write about for the next few years, at least. There is so much material
here that one could hardly hope to cover it all, and pick up all the
little gems that are just waiting to be discovered by the avid researcher.
For some time to come I’ll be mining this rich lode – rich
with meaning, and heavy with lessons for critics of the interventionist
foreign policy consensus.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo